William R. Buckley schrieb:
If the speed with which LaTeX could operate were such that output could be produced and displayed within the timeframe of a human keystroke (for fun, lets say you're a really good 150 wpm typist), how would this differ from WYSIWYG?
WYSIWYM only works when you trust the LaTeX machine to produce the best possible output. This seems the problem you habe. For the LyX users its THE advantage: You e.g. add a caption and you don't have to take care about it later. When the publisher tells you later that you should have italic captions, it is only one preamble entry away; when you use another document class, the caption layout is automatically changed according to the class rules. This is very useful when you are writing for several publishing companies. Most of the companies provide their own document class, all you have to do in LyX is to use the document class of your publisher and the text gets formatted as it should. This would not be possible with WYSIWYG.
But anyway, the things you complain about are design things of LaTeX, not LyX. LyX is a frontend to LaTeX to be able to write texts without the need to learn LaTeX. The concept of LaTeX has been proven to be THE choice for publishing companies all over the world: Nearly all scientific stuff, books as well as journals, are typeset using LaTeX (or pdfTeX, omega, etc.), even when you send your text to them as Word-file.
What I find missing is knobs. I guess I have to get used to working without knobs. Ventura Publisher has lots of knobs to its user interface, really powerful knobs.
I don't know what exactly you are missing. LyX provides you countless options and settings in all areas. But while reading your post again, it seems that you decided to use Ventura Publisher, before testing out LyX carefully. Many of your questions are obsolete when you read LyX's Intro manual and the Tutorial. The LyX UserGuide is a perfect document to see what output can be produced and how it can be produced. But while comparing programs, can Ventura handle nomenclatures, bilbiographies, and indexes? From all programs I know to publish books, LyX has the most powerful features for indexes and bibliographies.
regards Uwe
